There are some plays that you watch and immediately know what you feel about them, whether that’s a star rating or simple thumb directed north or south. Then there are shows like Nina, Caroline Williams’ metatheatrical, oftentimes absurdist play set in the audition room for an ‘experimental’ production of The Seagull (confusingly also called Nina), where so much thinking is required to understand the production that personal opinion can fall by the wayside.
Exploring huge concepts around power and gender and art, the Battersea Arts Centre’s production twists and ricochets at lightning speed. When I did take that beat to catch my breath, it became clear that whether I enjoyed Nina was the wrong question. I felt infuriated, heartbroken and deeply moved; I’d also laughed more than I had at the theatre in quite a while, those absurd switches from tears to chuckles only making the latter louder. The feeling, instead, was of being jolted – into action, or tears, but definitely into something.
A play in six acts, each marked with the drawing of a red velvet curtain and blaring of dramatic orchestral music, Nina gives the audience a peek into the elusive audition process. The four actresses (Maya Bartley O’ Dea, Samantha Begeman, Nina Bowers, Gemma Barnett) are all named, but are listed in the programme as Nina 01, Nina 02, etc. As legendary stage director Goran (Rowan Polonski) encourages the women to mine their lived experiences for truth, the boundaries between reality and theatre are blurred for the first time. They don’t stop there.
The try-outs progress and the women push themselves further and further to impress Goran, Williams and co-director Deborah Pearson stacking more metatheatrical layers upon the ones already present in Chekhov’s play. During audition number three, Goran’s playwright Tom (Joseph Payne, also serving as The Seagull’s Konstantin as the worlds mesh) picks up the seemingly static video camera and creates the avant-garde production they’re planning. We recognise these ‘experimental’ flourishes as contemporary theatre clichés: live feed video, women writhing and screaming in pain, swirling atmospheric sound scape (the latter by Alexander Comona). But their masterful deployment, in particular through Tomás Palmer’s layered projection work, is a sight to behold, and uneasily so.
Williams’ script is wry and sharp from the jump, with an ability to poke fun at the very theatrical system Nina (the play) sits within. The actresses gush about the European director’s work, the first auditionee telling him that she loved his Antigone “with the sand and the mice’. Later, Tom deadpans that the show will be so provocative ‘we may not use the original script at all}. The Ninas are desperate to please Goran, but as their boundaries are slowly eroded in the process, they somehow become complicit in creating this male-genius-monster.
As a commentary on the brutality of the acting world and creep of male power, Nina is up there with the best. Each actress puts themselves through the ringer for Goran, as the female stars do on stage before us; Begeman and Bowers, in particular, give two utterly heartrendering, at times distressing, performances. Yet what they create together is undeniably beautiful, as a means of wrongfooting. Whenever we are moved to anger or tears watching the process, the finished product is undeniably astounding. We, too, come to question whether it might be worth it.
That Nina is, in many ways, the very avant-garde theatre piece it’s mocking only adds to the meta-ness of it all. The show fluctuates between the realms of reality, play and the imaginary. When seagulls fall from the sky and rot on the floor in the seeming real world, nothing is clearly as it seems. Not everything works; some of the absurd flourishes make the plot hard to track, and the final 10 minutes feel like an unnecessary attempt to tie up an hour and a half that feel better left open. Still, I rarely leave the theatre feeling so deeply impacted and, frankly, galvanised by what I’ve seen. There’s real brilliance in Nina: the four female stars, the play-within-a-play, and BAC’s production itself.
